Default keyboard layout switching mechanism within X session has one specific trait - it toggles layouts systemwide, so for example, you may fall into following:
- having firefox window active, change keyboard layout for the one
other than English
- switch to another opened window and have the layout that you chose
in firefox window
- change layout / switch window as many times as you want, and have
the same picture
Some of us find this acceptable, but other people find this rather distracting, so those last ones might want to preserve each keyboard layout for each open window over time, until they want to change it manually.
But then there is another problem, which is specific to Emacs editor - there are two independent ways of changing keyboard layout. One way is to use internal Emacs machinery and another is to lay on systemwide mechanism that was described above. The problem itself is about using the system wide switcher breaks whole Emacs hotkeys functionality as for example “C-x b” changes to C-<1> <2>, whatever keys are binded to <1> and <2> respectively in one’s alternate keyboard layout, so barely all Emacs keybindings stop working.
The solution here is to not use systemwide layout switcher and rely on Emacs switcher instead. But we must be careful not to forward keypresses to Emacs, when changing the keyboard layout. On the other hand, it is pretty handy to have one keybinding for switching layouts in all applications including Emacs (rather than have separate keybinding for Emacs only)
This contrib extension was written with purpose of addressing the described problems.
Add this to your .stumpwmrc:
(load-module "perwindowlayout")For extension to start maintaining per-window keyboard layouts, add
this, to your .stumpwmrc:
(run-commands "enable-per-window-layout")Then, to actually switch keyboard layout, issue the command “switch-window-layout”, or bind it to a key, for example:
(define-key *top-map* (kbd "C-\\") "switch-window-layout")To stop maintaining per-window keyboard layouts, add
this somewhere else, to your .stumpwmrc (in some hook, for example):
(run-commands "disable-per-window-layout")This is in some way specific to Emacs.